Aba

This 19th-century Lebanese sheik is wearing an aba, which is probably made of aba cloth.

A Mevlevi dervish wearing a red garment that may be an aba

A type of coarse wool cloth popular for making warm, hard-wearing garments like overcoats and men’s trousers. Aba was inferior to wool broadcloth (çuka or çuha), but also more affordable. As a result, it was mostly a working-class fabric.

The aba was also an Arab garment shaped like a poncho with a slit down the front and stitching up the sides to the wrist. It almost never appears in period drawings–the one possible exception is on this page–but it shows up in estate records and descriptions of escaped slaves as a workingman’s overcoat.

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